My Soul To Keep
by Vanus Empty
Summary: S03. Evil made Its home in Absolution, Maine.


Hello and welcome to the first of a planned trilogy. This is the first piece which is set sometime in season three, pre-Dream a Little Dream of Me purely 'cause I want The Colt in it. I have the entire series planned, but only the first few chapters written out. Because I have the attention span of a small rodent, please do not fret if updates are... sporadic.

This is actually very loosely based on a movie I recently watched. I will not tell you it because that would give the entire story away. (Haha, I want to be sneaky in this!) By the time I've finished with this first part, I will tell you (people) what it was based on. (For those curious, there will be no romance of any kind. Romance ruins a good story.)

This is rated T for language and gore.

**Disclaimer: **This is a work of fiction. No profits were made. Eric Kripke owns Supernatural, any and all characters familiar. Everything else is mine.

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Sam Winchester leaned his head against the pane of glass, his head bobbing lightly as the Impala drove over the uneven pavement of the backwoods road they were driving on. To say he was in a bad mood was an understatement. The brothers had picked up a case from Bobby two days previous and were en route towards their destination.

Two days of driving in the dead of winter, with no heat and no music to distract him from the monotonous scenery. Halfway through their drive, the heater had (_"finally,"_ he remembered thinking) conked out. The radio had been on the fritz for the past couple of days as well and Dean hadn't had the time to get it repaired. Needless to say, Sam had grown bored several hundred miles ago.

He sighed, his breath fogging against the glass. His brother, Dean, turned to him, a curious eyebrow risen. "What's up?" He asked, eyes flicking back to the road.

"It's nothing," Sam muttered listlessly.

Dean's mouth quirked, then he nodded knowingly. "Bored, huh?"

"Oh, yea," he drawled.

"Read something, then."

"No internet access out here," Sam mumbled, his eyes closing.

Dean rolled his own eyes. "That's what paper books are for, Sammy."

"I'll fall asleep."

His brother sighed sharply. "Play a game on your computer, then, for God's sake. Your pissy mood is pissing me off."

Sam turned to glare at him. "Well, if you hadn't said, 'oh no, Sam. My baby's radio will never die. It'll be around far _longer than I will be_!' neither of us would be bored." He pointedly stressed the "longer that I will be," hoping to emphasize the reminder of Dean's Deal.

Dean rolled his eyes. "Fine, give me the run down on the case, then. What did Bobby say?" He asked sharply, despite already knowing. At least it would keep Sam occupied for at least five minutes and distract him from the topic of his Deal.

Sam sighed and conceded to defeat, leaning forwards to remove a folder that Bobby had complied from the dashboard. He opened it and gazed down at what was written. "Ah, okay. Um, several bodies have been found in various conditions. The first discovered was a man, ah, David Michaelson, 38. His wife reported him missing six days ago – she found his body was found 4 days ago. His heart was removed and his body was eviscerated."

Dean tossed out a theory. "Werewolf?"

"No," Sam disagreed. "The timing was wrong. The full moon had been the week previous. The second known victim was Jamie Keller, age 13. His mother said he had gone out to play a game of flashlight tag with some friends. An hour later she got a call from the police saying her son was dead. No one saw anything. Strange thing is is that the coroner had said that his body was so badly decomposed that if he hadn't known any better, he'd say that he was dead for weeks."

"What did they say the cause of death was?"

Sam lifted the paper, squinting at the text on the back. "Ah... exposure," he replied somewhat uncertainly. "Which is strange because he was apparently so bundled up in winter clothes that his friends had reported that he could barely move."

He turned the next page. "Next is Linda Morrow, age 42. Son found her dead in her house. She just dropped dead, apparently. No cause that the coroner could find, but there were superficial wounds." He held up a picture of the woman's body in autopsy, the image focused on her stomach. There was a symbol carved lightly into her flesh of a five-pointed compound symbol with a center triangle pointing down.

Dean's eyebrows lifted as he glanced at it. "Isn't that from the freaking _Blair Witch Project_?"

"Yea," Sam said, replacing the image. He read the disbelieving expression on his brother's face and shrugged. "Don't look at me, I didn't put it there. Anyway." He grimaced as he turned the next page. "By far the most gruesome murder yet. Henry Sinclair – 25. Recently married and flayed alive." He paused and his face grew ashen as he examined the pictures of Henry. "Actually, flayed doesn't quite cover it..."

Dean turned his face from the road and looked at the pictures. He wished instantly that he hadn't. The brothers actually hadn't gotten a chance to look through the folder, only knowing what Bobby had told them. This, the carnage, hadn't been brought up. "Holy freaking Christ," he swore, turning sharply away.

The flesh from Henry Sinclair's body had been stripped away all the way down to the bone, leaving him with only bloodstained bones from the pelvis down. According to the coroner, who had reportedly been so appalled that he had been unable to speak of it and opted for just filling out his report, Henry had been very much alive and very much conscious of the horror inflicted upon him. The official cause of death was exsanguination caused by Henry biting his own tongue off. The pagan symbol of the triple goddess, specifically the three-crescent one, was carved deeply onto his forehead, which made Dean frown. "Hey, wait," he steered clear of the previous topic quickly, "that symbol..."

Sam pointedly looked at the image of Henry's forehead. "That's the triple crescent," he observed, sounding surprised as well.

"Doesn't that stand for, ah," he snapped his fingers, "mother, maiden, and crone?" Dean questioned.

"It does, actually." Sam frowned at it for a few more minutes before sighing. He pushed that observation to the "To Be Examined Further" file in his mind before turning to the final page. "Last one found is Abigale Delacroix, age... age six," he breathed. "She was boiled alive and that had to have an artist identify her using her skull."

Dean rubbed his hand over his mouth was a heavy sigh. "Damn it. And what does Bobby think is killing these people?"

"He hasn't had the faintest clue," Sam said, his voice tight as he thought about what kind of _thing_ could possibly torture a tiny little girl.

"Those symbols carved into our guys, one's fictional, right? And the other is a wiccan symbol for women. So, what do you think?" Dean asked.

"I don't know," Sam said around a sigh. "Very angry spirit, demon. It could just be a serial killer. We won't know more until we interview the families. See if they know anything because the police haven't got a clue."

Dean rubbed his forehead tiredly. "Where is this place, again?"

"Absolution, Maine," Sam replied.

"Yay, snow," Dean deadpanned, scoffing through his nose.

* * *

This chapter, the prologue, is short. The next, real, chapter will be considerably longer. I apologize for the, er, shortness. This is just a teaser that I felt wouldn't smoothly fit in with the original chapter one, which was cut in half and made into a prologue and chapter one. I hope to have the next chapter up sometime within the next couple of days, if my Internet doesn't kick it.


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